SharkLAN LAN party.

[bigsharn]

Not sure if I'll get my wrists slapped for mentioning this, but I'm in the middle of organising a LAN event in the North Yorkshire area and wondered how many people on here would be interested?

The date's not set yet (though it'll be some time between 16th April and 2nd May over a few days. There's no definite venue yet as the details are being formalised, but capacity will be around 250 and it'll be BYOC only (Xbox or PC).

 

[bigsharn]

Might be better in the gamers forum

I thought that at first, but because the event's both Xbox and PC and I didn't fancy making two threads, figured it better put in here for the mods to decide

Where abouts in the North, Aberdeen is a bit further north than York...

Sorry, I should have explained that in the OP. We're currently looking at a location in North Yorkshire none too far from the A1, which is perfect for transport links (though weirdly lacks a train station).

An OCUK competitor has their own LANs in their shop in Scotland, but there doesn't seem to be much between Staffordshire and that, hence setting this up.


Edit: Oh fair enough, it's been shifted to PC gaming anyway

 

[bigsharn]

Have you ever run a LAN of this scale before?

Not personally, in fact I've never run a LAN before, I'm just the PR person The lads who are managing the network have done similar before now (32 player LAN). It's nowhere near this scale but if they're confident they can run it, I'll let them

Let me know if you need any advice/etc on running things. I used to run quite a large Manchester lan.

That would be helpful actually, we need a couple more staff members to set up and run the network, add me on facebook or MSN (Your choice, I'll send an email with my name) and we'll talk

Why are there never any LANs in the Midlands.

feelsbadman.jpg

There is, as much as I dislike promoting the competition Epic.LAN is in Uttoxeter racecourse next month (and no doubt they'll be doing one around the same time as we are in Easter)

 

[bigsharn]

Hmm, i'm sure the people you have are very good, but the difference running a 32 man LAN and 100 is massive, let alone 250. Im sure FrenchTart will give you pointers, but you need experience and money to get things going. For our 100 person LANs we use about £4000 worth of equipment, which was bought second hand. We also get the Internet for free from our uni.
There was talk of an OcUK forum LAN last year, i did some estimates of what we would have needed to do it, the first total was about £10,000 for 250 people. It all really depends on what you have already and what you need to buy just to make the LAN work.

All in hand, bearing in mind it's strictly BYOC. I'm coming out with similar figures to yourself, but being Yorkshire and firmly believing in the saying "Shy bairns get nowt" we've pretty much got the money/equipment side of it covered.

I'm curious as to Blackbadger posted, I can't see it for some reason

 

[bigsharn]

A "Portable" 200kw Power Supply - half joking...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuPPKx_nCiA&feature=player_embedded

At least no one would be moaning about the gpu fans making too much noise.

However its not unuseuall for enthusiasts pc's to draw nearly 1kw with peripherals/monitor. A hundred+ of them and you have serious issues.
Even if everyone had lower power xbox's + lcd's you'd still be looking at min 75kw load.

With this amount of power consumption you will be dealing with very high end dangerous amounts of current.. A real electrician will be needed. - Just distributing the power safely around the room with enough sockets, is a logistical nightmare.
Each person will require a absolute minimum of 2 sockets ? 1 for psu 1 for monitor. Probabbly 3-4 to be safe. You can't have people daisy chaining multi plug adaptors off your system. So you may end up having to provide 750+ surge protected sockets. Maybe you could share a 6 socket gangway between every 2 seats.

These will need to be patched into multiple industrial circuit breakers. You cant have 1 person climbing under the table frying themself, and taking out every one else's system in the process.

The actuall networking side is comparitively easy. (still a huge amount of cables/patches/switches) Luckily a rack of switches/routers for that many are readily available 2nd hand, due to companies often upgrading)

Imo your jumping way to far into the deep end. Ramping up from a comfortable classroom size of 32 to 250 is madness, and asking for failure.

In total honesty I never thought of the electrical side of it, the venue we're currently having words with can provide x amount of electrical outlets and people will be bringing their own power strip (there will be a "To bring" list on the forum soon).

If people run their computers at an average of 600w (And most of the games in the list don't require anywhere near that amount) We'll need 150Kw. The venue runs floodlights and outdoor events as it is so depending how much they can provide, we can just provide the difference (or so I assume).